The Rise of White Burgundy

The Angle

Over the past decade, two things have happened in fine wine. The broader market has roughly doubled. White Burgundy has more than quadrupled. Its top producers have gone further still.

When fine wine corrected from its 2022 peak, white Burgundy corrected less. When trading activity slowed, white Burgundy deepened. When Bordeaux First Growths lost buyers, white Burgundy gained them. The charts in this pack document that divergence and the market mechanics behind it.

The story isn’t that white Burgundy is expensive. It’s that white Burgundy is now traded as a living, current-drinking asset class — where nearly 90% of all traded value sits in vintages from the last 15 years — not as a cellar category. That’s a different investment profile, and it’s a different kind of market.

Chart guide

CHART 1 · PRICE INDEX

White Burgundy has outperformed the broader fine wine market

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A price-weighted index rebased to January 2016. White Burgundy has returned +335% over the decade, its top 10 producers +399%, against +107% for the broader fine wine market. All three peaked in 2022; the white Burgundy drawdown of 10% is the shallowest of the three.

CHART 2 · CUMULATIVE RETURNS BY CATEGORY

White Burgundy has led every major fine wine category over ten years

Cumulative returns across 1, 3, 5 and 10 year windows for five fine wine categories. White Burgundy and its top 10 producers have returned 154% and 165% over ten years respectively, against 41% for Bordeaux First Growths and 80% for the broader fine wine market.

CHART 3 · TOP PRODUCERS BY SHARE OF TRADING

Leflaive accounts for 41% of all top-10 white Burgundy trading

The top 10 white Burgundy producers on CultX, ranked by share of the basket’s combined 5-year trading activity. Domaine Leflaive dominates at 41% — roughly 3x the next closest producer — reflecting the breadth of its range and the weight of buyer demand across Montrachet, Chevalier-Montrachet, and Bâtard-Montrachet.

CHART 4 · MARKET DEPTH

The white Burgundy market is deepening, not just rising

Monthly trade count and unique wines traded on CultX. Both have more than doubled in five years: trades per month have risen +103% and unique wines per month +87% versus the 2021 baseline. A rising index with a widening tape is the profile of a category gaining liquidity, not losing it.

CHART 5 · TRADING BY VINTAGE AGE

White Burgundy trades like a living category, not a cellar one

The share of each fine wine category’s 5-year trade value, split by vintage decade. 89% of white Burgundy trading sits in 2011+ vintages, against 64% for the broader fine wine market and only 53% for Bordeaux First Growths. This is the structural story behind the price performance.

CHART 6 · HIGHEST PER-BOTTLE PRICES

A DRC Montrachet 2000 Jeroboam hit £52,500 per bottle

The 15 highest per-bottle prices paid for white Burgundy on CultX over the last five years, expressed as 75cl-equivalent. Domaine de la Romanée-Conti tops the list at £52,500 per bottle for a Jeroboam of Montrachet 2000, followed by Domaine d’Auvenay’s Bâtard-Montrachet at £15,000-£16,500 per bottle. A full top-30 list accompanies this pack as a data table.

CHART 7 · PRODUCER RETURNS LEAGUE TABLE

Pierre-Yves Colin-Morey leads the producer table with +137% over five years

Weighted-average 5-year price change for the wines of each top-10 white Burgundy producer on CultX. Pierre-Yves Colin-Morey leads at +137%, followed by Leflaive (+105%) and d’Auvenay (+98%). Every producer in the basket has delivered positive 5-year returns, with the median producer at around +60%.

Methodology

• All figures are sourced from the CultX marketplace, the live fine wine trading platform operated by Cult Wines Group. Prices are volume-weighted and reported in GBP at period-correct FX.
• All indices are rebased to January 2016 = 100. A 5-trade monthly floor is applied to each index constituent to avoid noise from thinly traded wines.
• The ‘Top 10 White Burgundy Producers’ basket is pre-selected for the editorial angle: Domaine Leflaive, Jean-François Coche-Dury, Domaine François Raveneau, Domaine Roulot, Domaine d’Auvenay, Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, Domaine des Comtes Lafon, Pierre-Yves Colin-Morey, Arnaud Ente, Vincent Dauvissat.
• ‘Fine Wine (ex-White Burgundy)’ is the broader fine wine price index excluding all white Burgundy constituents, to make the category comparison clean.
• Trading activity charts cover April 2021 - March 2026, a five-year window reflecting the period in which CultX has operated at scale.
• Producer returns (Chart 7) are weighted by each wine’s 5-year trade value on CultX, so more-traded wines carry proportionally more weight. Only wines with valid start- and end-period prices are included in the sample; n is shown per producer on the chart.
• LWIN11 is the Liv-ex unique identifier for a producer-wine-vintage combination. It is the standard reference code for fine wine across the industry.